Creating information-rich environmentsCreating businesses of engaged business people Connecting people and their work to goals Aligning measurement, rewards and recognition with business strategy

Helping CEOs Add Value

jim | April 16, 2013 | Communication, Leadership, Lean/Six Sigma, Performance Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution

The CEO of a Fortune 200 company had regular town hall meetings with his employees for years. When we conducted focus groups with employees to learn what they thought of the meetings, they liked what the CEO said during the town halls but when the meetings were over employees didn’t know what they were supposed to do differently as a result of the CEO’s message.

“We want to help but don’t know what to do differently,” one employee said.

Were the CEO’s town hall meetings adding value if nothing changed as a result of them? Not if you subscribe to the lean definition of value–any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

I know many people who would say the CEO’s visibility and willingness to communicate information about high level strategy added some measure of indirect value. To some extent I agree. On the surface, he didn’t do any harm.

But to a larger extent I disagree. Resources were spent on the town hall meetings. Employee downtime added to the cost. But work didn’t change. And because work didn’t change, results didn’t change.

So the effort was a pure investment with no short or anticipated long term gain.  Try as you might to make a thoughtful gesture equivalent to adding value, it isn’t. Is it safe to say that the CEO town halls were actually draining value from the organization?  If the CEO is getting paid to increase shareholder value, did the town hall meetings reflect an activity that was counter to the CEO’s goals?

I believe so.

So, should the CEO stop conducting town hall meetings. No. The company should supplement the town hall meetings with other activities that interpret the CEO’s message to the people in the organization. Business unit and department leaders need to interpret the CEO’s message. They need to explain:

  •  How company goals relate to our business unit of department goals.
  • Here’s what we need to do to drive corporate success.
  • And then relate this to the various people in the organization.

The sales person in the field, the brand manager at headquarters, the R&D people in the lab, the inventory manager, the machine operator, and the folks in shipping and receiving all need the information custom tailored for each area.

Leaders at all levels then need to make sure that everything they say and do are consistent with the CEO’s message. They need to make sure people have the resources they need to get the job done. Then leaders need to get out of the way.

The CEO’s town hall message adds value only when it gets translated and communicated throughout the organization.

New Best Practice Video

jim | January 29, 2013 | Change Management, Communication, Organizational Design, Strategy Clarification and Execution, Uncategorized

Six years ago, the vice president of communication for ConAgra Foods and one of her bright, young communication team members asked me to help them take a bold step out of their traditional role. They wanted to shift their work from distributing news and information to improving real business results.

Specifically, they wanted to help the company prevent people from getting hurt in their manufacturing plants. Five months later, our work together in a Missouri facility had reduced accidents there by 35 percent.

That success began the transformation of corporate communication at ConAgra Foods.  Since the first effort, the department has helped attack more safety issues, as well as improve productivity, turnover and quality in various parts of the company.  The Corporate Executive Board selected the ConAgra Foods approach as a best practice and produced a video about the process we used to get there.

Teresa Paulsen, vice president of communication and external relations for the $13 billion consumer package goods company, believes it’s critical that the function add value. “We decided that we didn’t want to spend all of our time doing traditional communication work if it didn’t add any value,” Paulsen explains. “We should be helping the company make money or save money.  If it doesn’t do that we probably shouldn’t be doing it.”

With the endorsement of the company’s CEO Gary Rodkin, Paulsen and her team have adopted an aggressive plan to turn the department into a function that prioritizes its work by the size of the results or returns that it generates for the company.   That’s new ground for many communication departments.

 

Top Two Reasons Leaders Don’t Work As a Team

jim | November 28, 2012 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Strategy Clarification and Execution

We recently surveyed CEOs about their top concerns and learned that many worry their own leaders aren’t all on the same page, despite assurances to the contrary.

When leaders aren’t in sync on company direction or priorities, they’re apt to:

  • Send mixed messages that confuse people
  • Create silos and turf battles that are debilitating and
  • Make it difficult for employees to do great things for customers.

Here are the top two reasons I’ve found why leaders aren’t on the same page, with ways to avoid both.

1. Lack of Vision and Strategy Clarification

These leaders assume that everyone on their team has a common understanding of the language included in the vision, strategy and goals documents.

Take the term “world class.” Everyone says they want to be world class, but what does it really mean? What does it look like? What do we have to do to become world class—specifically? How do we measure it?

Unless the words and phrases are translated into the way work gets done, leaders lead by assuming that we’re all on the same page when we’re not.

When I’m working with leaders to clarify their vision or strategy, I encourage them to paint a clear, detailed picture of what the vision or strategy is and is not. This “will do/won’t do” exercise turns something that starts out gray into black and white.

Vision metrics enable leaders to agree on what is world class and then communicate those expectations to the rest of the organization. For instance, agreeing on a zero lost time accidents for the next four years makes a clear statement about the safety goal. There’s nothing vague about that number.

2. Goal and Incentive Misalignment

During an employee survey we conducted for a Fortune 500 client, employees told us they knew the CEO encouraged collaboration among business units in order to go to market with a broad portfolio of products and services.

However, while employees agreed with the importance of collaboration, in reality they said there were huge walls between the business units and organizational departments. These silo walls were impeding collaboration. The leaders’ goals or incentives to the enterprise vision and strategy didn’t rigorously connect.

I asked to see the goals and incentives of the top leaders because I know how powerfully they communicate. They drive what people do.  I saw what I’d anticipated.

Jason’s goals and incentives focused on Jason’s business unit while Kristin’s goals and incentives focused on her business unit. Some of the leaders had enterprise goals but others didn’t. Some weightings were as large as 75 percent or as small as five percent. A five percent weighting communicates a low priority to whatever is attached.

To stimulate collaboration across the organization, the enterprise goals and weightings for this company were modified so they were similar and shared among the leadership team. This created interdependency across the team. It communicated, “For the enterprise to be successful, we all have to be successful.” Leaders must reinforce the importance of the larger team.

Clarify and Align…Everything

Step one of getting everyone on the same page is that leaders need to clarify the organization’s vision, strategy and performance targets.

Step two is to align the entire organization to those targets. Rewards, recognition, work processes, formal and informal communication, learning and development and organizational structure must all communicate and enable the same thing—a resolute focus on the vision, strategy and financial targets.

Then everything and everyone is on the same page, all the time.

Do You Have a Say/Do Gap? Are You Sure?

jim | August 1, 2012 | Communication, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Strategy Clarification and Execution

“Your actions speak so loudly I can hardly hear what you’re saying.”

That’s what one young woman told her supervisor. “You’re confusing me,” she told him. “One minute you’re discussing the importance of improving our team’s work quality,” she said. “But almost in the same breath you’re telling me there isn’t any money to train our team so they can improve. There’s a big say/do gap here.”

In this silly U.S. political season, it’s easy for candidates to get caught in the say/do gap rut.  “I promised one thing but I delivered something else.” Oops! A say/do gap.

Gaps between saying one thing and doing another are everywhere in many organizations, almost always created by leaders, the most powerful communication source in any organization.

People listen to what leaders say and watch what they do. When leaders say and do the same thing, people are more apt to decide and act in ways that help the business succeed. If the say and do communication are at odds, people become confused and performance suffers.

For this reason, I’ve written Walk the Talk©, a free guide to 50 specific actions that have helped good leaders make sure that what they say and do are consistent with successfully executing their business strategies.

Download Walk the Talk© for your tablet or e-reader, or print it out.

If you want to build walk the talk into your leadership development program, I’d be glad to discuss ways you can do it successfully.

It’s How You Play the Music

jim | June 21, 2012 | Communication, Leadership, Performance Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution

The leader of a large organization wanted help shifting his first line leaders’ roles to servant leadership, which means leading others through development, coaching and facilitation. Servant leadership is intended to replace command and control leadership.

We’d just finished assessing this leader’s work environment.  People we talked with told us the current leadership doesn’t foster a climate of openness and trust. They said they don’t have the information or resources they need to do their jobs well. First line managers weren’t involving people in decision making. The operation was underperforming on three of its four major goals.

Clearly, if the work environment was improved in the right way then performance could improve.  The leader asked what exactly could we do to address his dilemma.

I began explaining the steps in great detail, including brief stories about other large companies who had successfully navigated their way through the same process. I mentioned how they’d clarified the leaders’ roles, gave them new skills, measured their progress and held them accountable for doing their jobs differently. In each case, operating or financial performance improved.

When I finished describing the process he responded, somewhat abruptly, “We already do that!”

Ah, but it’s less about the process itself and more about how it’s executed.

“All music groups have access to the same sheet music,” I told him. “All sports teams have access to the same plays. But it’s not about the sheet music or the plays. It’s about how well the music is played or how well the plays are executed.”

With that, he nodded and we proceeded to improve his operation.

I repeatedly hear reputable and well-intentioned business leaders who think the shiny new object will be the source of skyrocketing performance. “Let’s do one of these,” a leader says pointing at a new business book that promises instant success. The staff says, “Yes sir,” and another program bites the dust.

Great execution is hard work. If your goal is excellence, ten percent of the trip should be about having the right strategy or plan. Ninety percent should be about damned good execution.  How well do you play the music?

What Counts is What You Count

jim | May 27, 2011 | Communication, Leadership, Performance Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution

Leaders can talk all they want about the need for people to work together, but if the numbers tell those people to work in silos they will.  The “do communication” will trump the “say communication” nearly every time.

What counts is what you count.

Among the CEO’s I work with, getting people to work together across functions and departments is one of the top issues. Why then, do others guard turf and focus only on their department, business unit, function or geographic area, which is often at the expense of the company’s overall health?

With the assumption that few if any of us get up in the morning relishing another emotionally-draining day of battle with our teammates, I believe we aren’t willingly creating the silos. Systems create them and they usually start within the goal setting and reward systems. These two systems communicate what’s expected in a powerful way.

If you want integration, check to see if your leaders have shared goals. The way I do it is to use a simple Excel spreadsheet, listing the leaders down the left column and company goals across the top. Fill in each leader’s goals and weightings. You should be able to see quickly if you have a problem. The goals will be out of whack at a glance.

Here’s what you should focus on:

  • Keep the number of goals to a minimum—the critical numbers. Having a small number of goals clarify priorities. Having many goals confuse people as to what’s important.
  • Company-related goals should be shared by the leaders and weighted heavily.  This makes it clear what’s important and creates interdependencies among the leaders. That is, the goals should be set so that individual member rewards come as a result of the entire team winning.
  • Business unit or functional goals should be secondary, so they should receive lighter weightings. They should drive the overall corporate goals.

If you’re trying to integrate your organization, start with the exercise I use and see what it tells you.  Then, if necessary, modify the goals and weightings to eliminate silos, integrate the organization and improve overall results.

Young Grads Need to Differentiate

jim | November 2, 2010 | Communication, Human Resource Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution

I receive many resumes from recent or soon-to-be college graduates. Many are extremely bright kids from the best schools. They do a good job laying out what they’ve done before and during college, but almost all have a flaw that can be fatal in this economy.

Let’s assume you and I are looking at the resume I was reviewing last week. It was a model background, great college, lots of impressive activities and internships during school and between semesters. Call it the model background for a college kid.

Content was strong but the packaging was deficient. Call it an iPod in a crummy box, which Steve Jobs would never permit.  The primary packaging deficiency? Lack of differentiation. His model background did not sell him over all the other model backgrounds out there.

Here’s what I told a young neighbor who was seeking my “business advice” about her resume and job search just recently.

“You and others with model backgrounds are competing for a finite number of jobs. Think of yourself and your competition (i.e., those with other model backgrounds) as boxes of cereal on a supermarket shelf. You’re all sitting there with very model backgrounds that are waiting to be purchased. If I’m a recruiter or a hiring manager at Name Your Company and I have a pile of model backgrounds from people coming out of school (I’ve thrown away the ones from people with average backgrounds), why should I hire you? What is it about your resume that makes you more special than those other boxes of cereal on the shelves?

“Think of your resume as packaging, not a list of activities. There’s a reason Apple is obsessed with design and packaging. Sure, people buy the results that an iPod or Mac Pro delivers. But the cool packaging helps make Apple products further stand out—and sell.

One way to differentiate is to turn activities into results where you can.  I realize that a 21 year old has a smaller list of accomplishments than someone older.  But, try your best to explain not just what you did but why it mattered. If your competitors have lists of activities and you have even a small list of results, you may have a point of differentiation that will represent a tipping point for your customer.

A good hiring manager has choices (lots of them these days).  She will decide on the candidate that stands out above the crowd.

What will make you stand out and, in turn, make the hiring manager look good to her boss?

Harvard Business Review: A good tool to have

jim | March 30, 2010 | Change Management, Communication, Performance Management, Strategy Clarification and Execution, Uncategorized

I found this current  Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Are You Ready to Rebound” instructive. It focuses on identifying new opportunities to improve business execution through:

  • Strong operational hydraulics
  • Rewards for performance, not mediocrity
  • Core values with teeth
  • The right conversations
  • Adventurous leaders in key positions
  • Constant pressure versus heroic efforts

It uses a straightforward and useful checklist of questions you can ask yourself.